Neutronium Alchemist - Consolidation nd-3

by Peter F. Hamilton

  Father had other children.

  Who were given to the Edenists so that they would be brought up in the greatest possible family environment. A whole world of family.

  She almost laughed out loud. Imagine that, Saldanas became Edenists. We made the transition in the end. Does King Alastair know about that?

  You are ducking the issue, Ione. One child of the Lord of Ruin is brought up with me as a parental, the heir. The others are not. As a parent you have a responsibility to their future.

  Are you saying I’ve been irresponsible conceiving this child?

  Only you can answer that. Were you depending on Joshua to be a stay-at-home father? Even then you must have known how unlikely that was.

  God, all this argument just because Joshua looks moody.

  I am sorry. I have upset you.

  No. You’ve done what you wanted to do, made me think. For some of us it’s painful, especially if you’re like me and hadn’t really considered the consequences of your actions. It gets me all resentful and defensive. But I’ll do the best for my child.

  I know you will, Ione.

  She blushed at the tenderness of the mental tone. Then she leaned against Joshua. “I was worried while you were gone,” she said.

  He took a sip of his Norfolk Tears. “You were lucky. I was scared shitless most of the time.”

  “Yes. Lagrange Calvert.”

  “Jesus, don’t you start.”

  “If you didn’t want the publicity, you shouldn’t have sold Lady Mac ’s sensor recordings to Collins.”

  “It’s hard to say no to Kelly.”

  Ione squinted at him. “So I gather.”

  “I meant: it’s hard to refuse that kind of money. Especially given my situation. The fee I got from Terrance Smith isn’t going to cover Lady Mac ’s repairs. And I can’t see the Lalonde Development Company ever handing over the balance on our contract, given there isn’t a Lalonde left to develop anymore. But the money I got from Collins will cover everything, and leave me happily in the black.”

  “Not forgetting the money you made on the Norfolk run.”

  “Yeah, that too. But I didn’t want to break into that, it’s kind of like a reserve I’m holding back for when everything settles down again.”

  “My hero optimist. Do you think the universe is going to settle down?”

  Joshua didn’t like the way the conversation was progressing. He knew her well enough now; she was steering, hoping to angle obliquely into the subject she wanted to discuss. “Who knows? Are we going to finish up talking about Dominique?”

  Ione raised her head from his shoulder to give him a puzzled glance. “No. What made you ask that?”

  “Not sure. I thought you wanted to talk about us, and what happens after. Dominique and the Vasilkovsky line played a heavy part in my original plans from here on in.”

  “There isn’t going to be an after, Joshua, not in the sense of returning to the kind of existence we had before. Knowing there’s an afterlife is going to tilt people’s perception on life for ever.”

  “Yeah. It is pretty deep when you think about it.”

  “That’s your considered in-depth analysis of the situation is it?” For a moment she thought she’d gone and wounded him. But he just gave a gaunt smile. Not angry.

  “Yeah,” he said, quiet and serious. “It’s deep. I had three bloody narrow escapes inside two days on that Lalonde mission. If I’d made one mistake, Ione, just one, I’d be dead now. Only I wouldn’t, as we now know, I’d be trapped in the beyond. And if Shaun Wallace was telling the truth—and I suspect he was—then I’d be screaming silently to be let back in no matter what the cost or who had to pay it.”

  “That’s horrible.”

  “Yes. I sent Warlow to his death. I think I knew that even before he went out of the airlock. And now he’s out there, or in there—somewhere, with all the other souls. He might even be watching us now, begging to be given sensation. The trouble with that is, I do owe him.” Joshua put his head back on the silk cushions, staring up at the ceiling. “Do I owe him big enough for that, though? Jesus.”

  “If he was your friend, he wouldn’t ask.”

  “Maybe.”

  Ione sat up and reached for the bottle to pour herself another measure of Norfolk Tears.

  I’m going to ask him,she told tranquillity.

  Surely you are not about to ask for my blessing?

  No. But I’d welcome your opinion.

  Very well. I believe he has the necessary resources to complete the task; but then he always has. Whether he is the most desirable candidate still presents me with something of a dilemma. I acknowledge he is maturing; and he would not knowingly betray you. Impetuosity does weigh against him, however.

  Yes. Yet I value that trait above all.

  I am aware of this. I even accept it, when it applies to your first child and my future. But do you have the right to make that gamble when it concerns the Alchemist?

  Maybe not. Although there might be a way around it. And I have simply got to do something.“joshua?”

  “Yeah. Sorry, didn’t mean to go all moody on you.”

  “That’s all right. I have a little problem of my own right now.”

  “You know I’ll help if I can.”

  “That’s the first part, I was going to ask you anyway. I’m not sure I can trust anyone else with this. I’m not even sure I can trust you.”

  “This sounds interesting.”

  She took a breath, committed now, and began: “Do you remember, about a year ago, a woman called Dr Alkad Mzu contacted you about a possible charter?”

  He ran a quick check through his neural nanonics memory cells. “I got her. She said she was interested in going to the Garissa system. Some kind of memorial flight. It was pretty weird, and she never followed it up.”

  “No, thank God. She asked over sixty captains about a similar charter.”

  “Sixty?”

  “Yes, Tranquillity and I believe it was an attempt to confuse the intelligence agency teams who keep her under observation.”

  “Ah.” Instinct kicked in almost immediately, riding a wave of regret. This was big-time, and major trouble. It almost made him happy they hadn’t leapt straight into bed, unlike the old days (a year ago, ha!). For him it was odd, but he was simply too ambivalent about his own feelings. And he could see how she’d been thrown by his just-old-friends approach, too.

  Sex would have been so easy; he just couldn’t bring himself to do it with someone he genuinely liked when it didn’t mean what it used to. That would have been too much like betrayal. I can’t do that to her. Which was a first.

  Ione was giving him a cautious, inquiring look. In itself an offer.

  I can stop it now if I want.

  It was sometimes easy for him to forget that this blond twenty-year-old was technically an entire government, the repository of state, and interstellar, secrets. Secrets it didn’t always pay to know about; invariably the most fascinating kind.

  “Go on,” Joshua said.

  She smiled faintly in acknowledgement. “There are eight separate agencies with stations here; they have been watching Dr Mzu for nearly twenty-five years now.”

  “Why?”

  “They believe that just before Garissa was destroyed she designed some kind of doomsday device called the Alchemist. Nobody knows what it is, or what it does, only that the Garissan Department of Defence was pouring billions into a crash-development project to get it built. The CNIS have been investigating the case for over thirty years now, ever since they first heard rumours that it was being built.”

  “I saw three men following her when she left Harkey’s Bar that night,” Joshua said, running a search and retrieval program through his neural nanonics. “Oh, hell, of course. The Omuta sanctions have been lifted; they were the ones who committed the Garissa genocide. You don’t think she’d . . . ?”

  “She already has. This is not for general release, but last week Alkad Mzu escaped fr
om Tranquillity.”

  “Escaped?”

  “Yes. She turned up here twenty-six years ago and took a job at the Laymil project. My father promised the Confederation Navy she would neither be allowed to leave nor pass on any technical information relating to the Alchemist to other governments or astroengineering conglomerates. It was an almost ideal solution; everyone knows Tranquillity has no expansionist ambitions, and at the same time she could be observed continually by the habitat personality. The only other alternative was to execute her immediately. My father and the then First Admiral both agreed the Confederation should not have access to a new kind of doomsday device; antimatter is quite bad enough. I continued that policy.”

  “Until last week.”

  “Yes. Unfortunately, she made total fools out of all of us.”

  “I thought Tranquillity’s observation of the interior was perfect. How could she possibly get out without you knowing?”

  “Your friend Meyer lifted her away clean. The Udat actually swallowed inside the habitat and took her on board. There was nothing we could do to stop him.”

  “Jesus! I thought my Lagrange point stunt was risky.”

  “Quite. Like I said, her escape leaves me with one hell of a problem.”

  “She’s gone to fetch the Alchemist?”

  “Hard to think of any other reason, especially given the timing. The only real puzzle about this is, if it exists, why hasn’t it been used already?”

  “The sanctions. No . . .” He started to concentrate on the problem. “There was only ever one navy squadron on blockade duties. A sneak raid would have a good chance of getting through. That’s if one ship was all it took to fire it at the planet.”

  “Yes. The more we know about Dr Mzu, the less we understand the whole Alchemist situation. But I really don’t think her ultimate goal can be in any doubt.”

  “Right. So she’s probably gone to collect it, and use it. The Udat has a fair payload capacity; and Meyer’s seen combat duty in his time, he can take a bit of heat.” Except . . . Joshua knew Meyer, a wily old sod, for sure, but there was one hell of a difference between the occasional mercenary contract, and annihilating an entire planet of unsuspecting innocents. Meyer wouldn’t do that, no matter how much money was offered. Offhand, Joshua couldn’t think of many (or even any) independent trader captains who would. That kind of atrocity was purely the province of governments and lunatic fanatics.

  “The use of it is what concerns me the most,” Ione said. “Once it’s been activated, governments will finally be able to see what it can actually do. From that, they’ll deduce the principles. It’ll be mass-produced, Joshua. We have to try and stop that. The Confederation has enough problems with antimatter, and now possession. We cannot allow another terror factor to be introduced.”

  “We? Oh, Jesus.” He let his head flop back onto the cushions—if only there was a stone wall to thump his temple against instead. “Let me guess. You want me to chase after her. Right? Go up against every intelligence agency in the Confederation, not to mention the navy. Find her, tap her on the shoulder, and say nicely: All is forgiven, and the Lord of Ruin would really like you to come home, oh, and by the way, whatever your thirty-year plan—your obsession —was to screw up Omuta we’d like you to forget it as well. Jesus fucking Christ, Ione!”

  She gave him an unflustered sideways glance. “Do you want to live in a universe where a super-doomsday weapon is available to every nutcase with a grudge?”

  “Try not to weight your questions so much, you might drown.”

  “The only chance we have, Joshua, is to bring her back here. That or kill her. Now who are you going to trust to do that? More to the point, who can I trust? There’s nobody, Joshua. Except you.”

  “Walk into Harkey’s Bar any night of the week, there’s a hundred veterans of covert operations who’ll take your money and do exactly what you ask without a single question.”

  “No, it has to be you. One, because I trust you, and I mean really trust you. Especially after what you did back at Lalonde. Two, you’ve got what it takes to do the job, the ship and the contacts in the industry necessary to trace her. Three, you’ve got the motivation.”

  “Oh, yeah? You haven’t said how much you’ll pay me yet.”

  “As much as you want, I am the national treasurer after all. That is, until young Marcus takes over from me. Did you want to bequeath our son this problem, Joshua?”

  “Shit, Ione, that’s really—”

  “Below the belt even for me? Sorry, Joshua, but it isn’t. We all have responsibilities. You’ve managed to duck out of yours for quite a while now. All I’m doing is reminding you of that.”

  “Oh, great, now this is all my problem.”

  “No one else in the galaxy can make it your problem, Joshua, only you. Like I said, all I’m doing is making the data available to you.”

  “Nice cop-out. It’s me that’s going to be in at the shit end, not you.” When Joshua looked over at her he expected to see her usual defiant expression, the one she used when she was powering up to out-stubborn him. Instead all he saw was worry and a tinge of sorrow. On a face that beautiful it was heartbreaking. “Look, anyway, there’s a Confederation-wide quarantine in effect, I can’t take Lady Mac off in pursuit even if I wanted to.”

  “It only applies to civil starflight. Lady Macbeth would be re-registered as an official Tranquillity government starship.”

  “Shit.” He smiled up at the ceiling, a very dry reflex. “Ah well, worth a try.”

  “You’ll do it?”

  “I’ll ask questions in the appropriate places, that’s all, Ione. I’m not into heroics.”

  “You don’t need to be, I can help.”

  “Sure.”

  “I can,” she insisted, piqued. “For a start, I can issue you with some decent combat wasps.”

  “Great, no heroics please, but take a thousand megatonnes’ worth of nukes with you just in case.”

  “Joshua . . . I don’t want you to be vulnerable, that’s all. There will be a lot of people looking for Mzu, and none of them are the type to ask questions first.”

  “Wonderful.”

  “I can send some serjeants with you as well. They’ll be useful as bodyguards when you’re docked.”

  He tried to think up an argument against that, but couldn’t. “Fine. Unsubtle, but fine.”

  Ione grinned. She knew that tone.

  “Everyone will just think they’re cosmoniks,” she said.

  “Okay, that just leaves us with one minor concern.”

  “Which is?”

  “Where the hell do I start looking? I mean, Jesus; Mzu’s smart, she’s not going to fly straight to the Garissa system to pick up the Alchemist. She could be anywhere , Ione; there are over eight hundred and sixty inhabited star systems out there.”

  “She went to the Narok system, I think. That’s where the Udat ’s wormhole was aligned, anyway. It makes sense, Narok is Kenyan-ethnic; she may be contacting sympathisers.”

  “How the hell do you know that? I thought only blackhawks and voidhawks could sense each other’s wormholes.”

  “Our SD satellites have some pretty good sensors.”

  She was lying; he knew it right away. What was worse than the lie, he thought, was the reason behind it. Because he couldn’t think of one, certainly not one that had to be kept from him, the only person she trusted to send on this job. She must be protecting something, a something more important than the Alchemist. Jesus. “You were right, you know that? The night we met at Dominique’s party, you said something to me. And you were right.”

  “What was it?”

  “I can’t say no to you.”

  Joshua left an hour later to supervise the Lady Mac ’s refit, and round up his crew. It meant he missed Kelly’s report, which put him in a very small minority. Kate Elvin’s earlier optimism had been well founded; the other news companies didn’t even try to compete. Ninety per cent of Tranquillity’s population accessed
the sensevises Kelly had recorded on Lalonde. The impact was as devastating as predicted—though not at once. The editing was too good for that, binding segments together in a fast-paced assault on the sensorium. Only afterwards, when they could duck the all-out assault on their immediate attention, did the implications of possession begin to sink in.

  The effect acted like a mild depressant program or a communal virus. Yes, there truly was life after corporeal death. But it seemed to be perpetual misery. Nor was there any sighting of God, any God, even the Creator’s numerous prophets went curiously unseen; no pearly gates, no brimstone lakes, no judgement, no Jahannam, no salvation. There was apparently no reward for having lived a virtuous life. The best anybody now had to hope for after death was to come back and possess the living.

  Having to come to terms with the concept of a universe besieged by lost souls was a wounding process. People reacted in different ways. Getting smashed, or stoned, or stimmed out was popular. Some found religion in a big way. Some became fervently agnostic. Some turned to their shrinks for reassurance. Some (the richer and smarter) quietly focused their attention (and funding) to zero-tau mausoleums.

  One thing the psychiatrists did notice, this was a depression which drove nobody to suicide. The other constants were the slow decline in efficiency at work, increased lethargy, a rise in use of tranquilizer and stimulant programs. Pop psychology commentators took to calling it the rise of the why-bother psychosis.

  The rest of the Confederation was swift to follow, and almost identical in its response no matter what ethnic culture base was exposed to the news. No ideology or religion offered much in the way of resistance. Only Edenism proved resilient, though even that culture was far from immune.

  Antonio Whitelocke chartered twenty-five blackhawks and Adamist independent trader starships to distribute Kelly’s fleks to Collins offices across the Confederation. Saturation took three weeks, longer than optimum, but the quarantine alert made national navies highly nervous. Some of the more authoritarian governments, fearful of the effect Kelly’s recording would have on public confidence, tried to ban Collins from releasing it; an action which simply pushed the fleks underground whilst simultaneously boosting their credibility. It was an unfortunate outcome, because in many cases it clashed and interacted with two other information ripples expanding across the Confederation. Firstly there was the rapidly spreading bad news about Al Capone’s takeover of New California, and secondly the more clandestine distribution of Kiera Salter’s seductive recording.